HISE Player
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I'm really getting into HISE at the moment and looking at developing a library in it and perhaps converting some of my Kontakt libraries, but my end user is the most important thing, so I'm wondering about the HISE Player that I've seen mentioned on the forum.
What stage of development is this currently at?
Will this be free for users?
What security will it use?
Will it support some form of lossless audio compression? (does HISE already support this?) -
The HISE Player stuff was put on hold because most feedback I got was about compiling own plugins so I am currently focussing on this deployment method.
However, these are the plans for the HISE player:
- closed source (unlike the development backend, which stays open source)
- desktop plugins (AAX, VST / AU) as well as iOS app from the same HISE patches (build your plugin and export it as iOS playable instrument).
- not free, but very cheap (something like 10$). This will be a one time payment (so the end user has to spend 10$ once to get every HISE player library available). This small fee will be funding further development. However to get the ball rolling I could imagine some deals with early bird developers to get some coupons to distribute the HISE player for free for the first customers.
- no licence fees for the developer.
- basic copy protection using a RSA key to prevent simply copying (this is the reason why it will be closed source, because it is pretty impossible to implement copy protection with a completely open source architecture). I won't put too much effort in it to make it uncrackable tough, because it's a waste of time IMHO.
But I can't do any estimates when I find the time to do this. If you really want to dive into HISE development I would recommend building a compiled plugin. Although you need a JUCE licence (1000$) for it and some licence fees for HISE (PM me for more details and we can talk about some early bird special). This system is far more actively maintained (I am currently using it to develop a 3rd party library which will be released in the near future).
If you set up your build system correctly, you can compile native VST / AU plugins from within HISE using a one click exporter, so you don't need any experience in writing C++ code to build native plugins with HISE.
RE lossless audio compression, HISE does support FLAC and Apple Lossless, however the decompression algorithms are stressing the streaming engine up to an extend where I would recommend to just use uncompressed samples.
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Thanks for the detailed response. For the compiled plugin, is this practical for a large mutli GB library? Are the samples protected or can the user access them?
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The samples can be stored in a monolithic file format, which is basically just an uncompressed but unencrypted chunk of audio data without metadata. The metadata as well as the mapping information is embedded into the plugin which makes the monolith files alone pretty useless.
I won't encrypt those samples, because they need to be decrypted while streaming, which affects performance. So if anyone with bad intentions wants to reverse engineer the monolith files and find the start / end points of the samples as well as the mapping information, he could do it but it is not less tedious than just run the sample library through something like SampleRobot…
Everything else (the images for the interface, the impulse responses, the sample mapping information and the scripts) will be embedded inside the binary and only accessible for people who know how to crack binaries.
A standard sample library plugin has a size of 20 - 50 MB depending on the embedded data.
And there is already a copy protection scheme based on a licence key file which can be obtained by calling a .PHP script on your web server.
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This sounds very good.
